The Wording Way

 I enjoy sleeping but sometimes I forget how and these last few days have 12 to 13 of these times. The good thing about not sleeping is that my brain has all those extra hours to just keep scraping the bottom of the barrel so I end up with thoughts that maybe would have been better served being forgotten. But no, I unlock the back rooms of my brain when I lack the sleep that my brain needs to exercise any judgment or self-control. So don't say I didn't warn you. OK, say it. Who cares? I'm practically a zombie at this point except I can't stomach brains, or vice versa.

I was thinking about a phrase I hear bandied about -- history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes (attributed variously to Mark Twain and y'know, that guy who wrote about Tom Sawyer, whatever his name is). So I got to thinking, sure, it rhymes, but with what? Mystery? Blistery? Are these things that history should be proud of? And so what if it rhymes with "blistery"? What does that get anyone?

But then I started considering that category of words that do not have rhymes. I felt bad about that -- why deprive them? All those words like month, purple, silver, orange, ninth, pint, wolf, opus, dangerous, marathon and discombobulate, they must be lonely. I bet they have some sort of support group to help them cope. And then, when someone comes up with a potential rhyme, the word feels seen, and doesn't show up to the next meeting. Invariably he comes back when the public decides that nurple isn't really a word; purple slinks back to the group session with all the other words saying nothing but silently scolding him for holding out that phantom hope, secretly glad he came back in a jealous way. And he knows. He knows.

Do words with rhymes (the "benefits" of the dictionary set include rhyming groups) bully words without rhymes? That seems mean. What lesson are we teaching our kids? Check your privilege!

Those words, as I see it, are the prime numbers of the rhyming world. They rhyme with nothing but themselves and the number one. I wonder if there is a similar formula so that scientists can compute  then next prime word in the sequence. If there isn't, someone should invent that and win the Nobel Prize for lexical mathematics (a sadly under-rated field usually only represented by Gematria nerds).